


won't let this city destroy us

by ilgaksu



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1950s Manchester, 50s Manchester, F/F, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Period-Typical Anti-Semitism, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Teddy Boys AU, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 01:28:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3271700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky laughs around the sweet in his mouth, curls it around <em>babydoll</em> and the devil's grin. Steve tells him he's gonna choke.</p><p> </p><p>Teddy Boys AU, set in 1950s Manchester.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Steve was born in this city and he’ll die in this city; he knows this like he knows the Lord’s Prayer, the taste of blood in his mouth, the crush of the old tin knuckledusters against the bird-bones of his hands, thin and delicate -

Steve draws and draws and draws, charcoal bleeding all over the page. Last week he got knocked down the step for stopping the local boys breaking windows in. Steve Rogers may walk the walk but he’s not toeing the line, he may walk the walk but he sure don’t talk the -

Bucky came screaming into this world under the wrong flag and wrong religion and wrong everything, really. He’s Jewish in a Catholic neighbourhood and his parents fled Europe in the last war, the war just gone, and they don’t talk about the places they’ve been. He loops an old bicycle chain taut around his hands and has a diehard crush on Marlon Brando they don’t talk about and they don’t talk about a lot of things they do, really.

Boys like them don’t go the places they go or do the things they do and this, the velvet jackets and drainpipe jeans, it’s an art, it’s a long con, it’s assimilation. People wouldn’t get out of the way for plain old Steve and Bucky, but they’ll sure as hell get out the way of Rogers and Barnes.

Bucky sweats blood trying not to turn out like his old man, trying to look enough of the part, trying to make his accent catch right.

Steve’s breath doesn’t ever catch right, so he sits and watches Bucky dance off the bruises, dance long and hard, dance all night, because it’s the era when angry young men are made and for the next few hot hours the world could maybe be theirs.

 

*

 

“Maloney’s boys are back again,” is what Steve says where most people would say hello.

“Hi to you, too.” Bucky joins him on the stoop, breathes out, careful to turn his head downwind so the smoke doesn’t hit Steve. “How’s your ma?”

It’s a Sunday, and Steve goes to visit the cemetery on Sundays with flowers he can’t hardly afford. Bucky taps the cigarette; the ash withers. Brings it back to his lips slow.

Steve is watching him, expectant. Steve is always expectant, always asking Bucky for more than he can give. Bucky always hands it over, always reaches down inside; finds that last soft wet space Steve Rogers hasn’t wormed into yet and he claws it out and gives it up every time.

“Y’know,” Bucky replies, drawling it in the way he knows drives Steve mad, “They say the Aztecs used to make human sacrifices to their gods. Ripped their hearts out alive and everything. They’d still be beating in the hands of their priest.”

Steve wrinkles his nose and Bucky thinks _I can’t give you anymore. Don't ask me to. One day I’m gonna offer you something properly ugly instead. Don't ask me don't._

“Maloney’s boys can wait.”

“They can’t,” Steve insists. “They were banging all up and down on Sam’s last night.”

“Again?”

“Again.” Steve’s face is grim. Here’s the thing: people got Steve pinned down as some blue-eyed boy wonder, but Steve isn’t naive. He wants to believe the best in people. He just gets proved wrong a lot.  

“Sam’s better at taking them on than me. Boy’s got wings,” Bucky says, thinking of Sam’s neat little trick of swinging over railings and kicking guys in the chest.

“It’s not fair. Sam’s dad was in the war, same as theirs. They got no right.” Steve is almost spitting now. Bucky looks at him, all bones and hellcat eyes, and almost laughs.

“Yeah, well, Rogers. They never do.”

 

*

 

When Bucky dreams, he dreams in Polish, he dreams in German, he dreams in Russian, _matka soldat боюсь_ unspooling over his tongue, a life given violent birth again. In the dreams, he is not called James. He runs along the streets to the department store and his fingers skip and jump over the bullet holes in their building. _Siostra stern Кто я_ and here it is Ave Maria at mass. Bucky learns the words quick, has always been fast like that, able to slip in the spaces between, _sabat lauf не оглядывайся назад_ -

Bucky dreams about trains and cries in his sleep every time. One time he laughs and Steve asks him about it the next morning and Bucky can’t remember but he thinks he dreamt about Becca before she was called Becca, button nose in her cradle, yowling like a cat when they put her in the bath. Bucky thrashes when he dreams of the old boxing club, the itch of bandages around his fist and the reek of desire barely contained inside his skin.

Sometimes, when Bucky dreams, he dreams about falling. He jolts awake; it takes him a long time to go back to sleep. _Tęsknię do domu, ichvermisse hause, я скучаю по дому._

 

*

 

Bucky laughs around the sweet in his mouth, curls it around _babydoll_ and the devil’s grin. Steve tells him he’s gonna choke.

“I ain’t breathing the life back into you, Buck. I tell you, I ain’t, not when it’ll be your own damn fault,” he tells him airily, late night in their apartment, getting ready to go out on the town like there’s enough soul in the town to be going out for.

“Gonna remember that next time Maloney's boys try and shove your teeth back down your neck.”

Steve laughs and his laugh is golden. Bucky shields himself with his cheap Asimov paperback, the tang of the hairspray caught sour in the back of his throat. Steve isn’t a lady-killer, isn’t even close, but he shellacs his hair into place like he’s going to war, like he’ll never come back, and can you blame him, really? Tonight he’s going to ask Peggy Carter to dance with him in front of everyone they know and Steve’s as nervous as if he’s asking for her hand. The hairspray glistens, wavering in the air as his hand shakes. She’s got a harsh right hook and a bloody vixen mouth and a swirl of sugary petticoats that don’t mask the hard armoured glint of her nails. She’s a hell of a girl, and Bucky can see that, and she hasn’t ever laughed at Steve’s lungs, but -

Bucky knows the bones of him, has seen the lean of his spine through his shirt as he rushes into the fray and yet and yet and yet -

“She’s a lucky dame,” he tells Steve.

Steve rolls his eyes, lets loose another billow of hairspray. Steve don’t see it, but Bucky always keeps on trying. And can you blame him really?

“You’re gonna set off your chest,” Bucky warns, “Hairspray don’t help it.”

“Nothing helps it,” Steve retorts, sharp with nerves, and Bucky falls silent. “Sorry, Buck, I just - how am I looking?”

“You look good,” Bucky tells him, honest. Steve’s taken to wearing Bucky’s old jackets because they fall too long on him like the fashion goes. He’s all drainpipe legs and grey brothel-creepers and the pipecleaner tie brings his eyes out nice as pie.

“You’re fine, Stevie, just fine, I swear, soon as you stop looking at me like a dead man walking. You’re going out to meet a girl, not a firing squad. And quit it with the hairspray already.”

“You told me I was a walking headache this morning,” Steve retorts, meeting his eyes in the mirror’s reflection. “You sure changed your tune.”

“Yeah, well. It’s Saturday night.” Bucky can already feel the hum of the promised evening under his skin, itching to get out. “I like everyone more on Saturdays.”

 

*

 

Bucky’s parents had shares in a department store once. The place had a contact with the military and they’d hired his Gentile father as the advisor, never asked about his mother, smiled at the children and given them sweets as though to wash the wrong blood out of them with sugar. Bucky still prices surplus at the local market in his head, knows how much it would cost to get chocolate in bulk, buys his cigarettes that way because he knows from days following his father around the house it’s cheaper. Bucky knows how to feed an army, and it helps when he’s stretching the last of the potatoes in their weekly sums. He always has the golden light of the store windows in his head when he does so, and if he stops to watch the weekly changing displays in the high street, Steve always waits patiently for him to catch back up. They pretend it’s Bucky catching up to Steve that way, rather than the other way around.

The Barnes family had been going up in the world then. They even bought a car. There was nothing to fear from uniforms. Everything had been apples and honey, but it was like a rollercoaster: when they’d gone down, they’d nearly gone under, their bones rattling in the carriage.

Tonight, Bucky smelt some perfume on a girl at the dance hall halfway through swinging her around the floor. It had smelt like the inside of that store used to, warm and powdery. He’d dragged her out back and kissed her neck all through it, his hands up her skirt and his mouth breathing her in. A nostalgia fuck, someone had called it once and Bucky had laughed along even though he hadn’t known what it meant; his English hadn’t stretched that far then. It does now. Angie had given him a look as he escorted the girl back in on wobbly legs, a look that said  _I know your game, mister_. He’d shrugged and she’d turned back to Peggy in a blur of curled hair. 

“There are dogs better than you, James Barnes,” Natasha says, dropping down beside him from the balcony rail and laughing. Bucky leans over and pops her bubblegum for her.  She’s tall for a girl, scowls at him and bats his shoulder. He grins.

“Don’t make me break something, Barnes,” she warns. Bucky can’t quite tell if she means it. She leans against the wall with him and watches the floor swirl by, toying with the laces on her wingtip shoes. She’s in capri pants and blazer, toughest teddy girl on the block, and Bucky remembers how good she’d looked in his shirt once. She catches his eye and smiles slow and smug; he's more transparent than he thought. Feeling caught out, he scans the hall. Sees Steve drinking cola, pure cola, and biting his lip. Bucky snorts and catches his breath at the same time.

“You gonna talk to him?” Nat says softly.

He doesn’t play dumb. He’s never tried with Nat, not when they were together and not when they ended it. It’s why they still like each other.

“I don’t see why I gotta,” he replies.

“Sure, James, sure,” she sighs.

He tears his eyes away from Steve, asks her to dance because it’s easier.  She’s the prettiest dancer Bucky’s ever met and they look good together, they always have.

“Why’d we stop, anyhow?” he asks her in a moment of sudden honesty. She looks up at him, hair coiled up around her head, kohl-eyed, and smiles sympathetically.

“We got too close,” she replies. “Ended up on the other side of each other somehow.”

“Yeah,” he says softly, frog in his throat.

Over her shoulder, he can see Steve dithering next to Peggy, glancing up out of the corners of his eyes and fussing with his hair whilst he talks to her. Peggy is resplendent in scarlet; blood hot with it, her lipstick immaculate as Steve’s hair, both in their separate armours. She laughs at something Steve says and Steve looks wounded by the attention. _Ask her already_ , Bucky thinks with a lancing, stinging rage that hits low in the gut and aches. _Ask her already so we can all get over it._

“Yeah, Nat. It was something like that, wasn’t it?”

 

*

 

Rumlow corners him in the men’s toilets, when he’s splashing water on his face. The cold trickles down Bucky's collar as he looks up to face him.

“We keep meeting like this,” Bucky says lightly, “People are gonna start talking.” The adrenaline in him sings hallelujah but he sure don't go to church. 

 _Don’t turn your back on them,_ his father’s voice says. _Don’t you ever turn your back. That’s when they’ll -_

“Fuck off,” Rumlow snarls. “Maloney wants to talk.”

“Funny, that,” Bucky says, straightening up properly to lean against the wall. “The Maloney I know can’t talk for shit.”

“You and the Rogers kid. You’ve been making trouble about Rickshaw Street.”

Rumlow cracks his knuckles. Bucky smirks. He doesn’t go in for posturing. He goes in for the kill.  

“What’re you laughing at?”

“Not much.”

He sees when Rumlow gets it by the way his eyes narrow.

“I got better things to be doing than being holed up in here with a koshie like you.”

“You sure?” Bucky says.  “'Cause I live for these Saturday nights together.”

Rumlow throws the first punch. Because here’s the thing: Bucky’s grown lean and hard and hollow on want. Steve’s the apple of his eye and all, but did nobody tell you apple pips are cyanide in your teeth? Did nobody ever tell you Bucky Barnes is angry as the day is long, and some men are just stupid enough to give him an excuse? How they’re always stupid enough to give it to him?

 

Did nobody ever tell you?

 

*

 

"Barnes," he says and Phillips sighs without looking up from the form.

"Ain’t you got nothing better to do on a Saturday night, kid?" he asks as he begins to fill in the form from memory alone. Bucky sees the name: James Buchanan Barnes, named for a president in the hopes it’d help their visa application to the US. It didn’t, so now they’re here. Bucky remembers: the ricochet of guns, a midnight train, chanting the prayer for the dead over and over in his mind as he handed his fake passport over to the cold-eyed guard. Bucky remembers: Rumlow threw the first punch, Bucky got his excuse, always tell them it was self-defence. Bucky remembers.

"Nothing on at the picture house and they wouldn’t play my song down the road," Bucky replies, drawls it, laces it with killer disdain like cheap vodka in cola. Keeps eyes up to meet Steve’s.

Steve, next in line, leant against the corridor wall and watching, watching. Nobody looks good in shitty holding cell light, but somehow Steve manages it; he looks so sickly anyway it turns him to marble. He grins, licks the blood off his fat lip. Bucky smirks in return. _Suits you,_ he mouths. Steve rolls his eyes. _Jerk,_ he mouths back. Bucky feels sick with guilt inside that he dragged Steve into this, but Steve’s spoiling for a fight as much as Bucky is. When Rumlow and him had burst through the doors and onto the floor, mad as a hornet’s nest, Steve had jumped right in, haloed by the electric lights. Bucky doesn’t think he got that dance. If he was a better person, he’d feel sorry for that. But the apple core of him, that tough cyanide inside, whispers that he isn’t.

"I don’t see nothing funny about this, Barnes," Phillips tells him, bringing his attention back.

"Sir yes sir," Bucky says, and salutes. Phillips doesn’t even react by now, but the ripple of sniggers in the queue don’t ever get old.  

"You’re a bright kid and you’re back here and I’m wondering why, then. Wondering if you aren’t so clever as you think."

There’s no word, Bucky’s decided, no word so decidedly insulting in the English language as _clever_ , with its connotations of too much. Clever means sticking your head up over the parapet. Clever means getting it shot right off. Clever, in essence, means decapitation.

Bucky lets the resentment wash over him, does the thing where he bites on his lip and smiles at the same time, slow and slower. He sees the breath catch in Steve’s lungs. It twists the screws in his chest a little tighter, a little madder.  Sometimes when he looks at Steve, he sees gilded Russian icons, with their huge martyr-honey eyes and blood dripping from their hands and butter-gold spilling out around them and Bucky, iconoclast bastard that he is -

Bucky only knows how to desecrate.

"I guess I got great taste," is all he says and watches Steve’s eyes flare in the fluorescent light.  

  



	2. broke the same bread

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You look," Natasha begins and doesn’t finish, her breath a waft of grape and sugar from the bubblegum.
> 
> For those who want to avoid it, there is the description of a homophobic attack. It's from 'He zips himself up' to 'He comes to half an hour later.'

 

When he gets two or three drinks in him, Bucky stops feeling the bruises swell and twinge tender and defiant just under the skin. Stops feeling the tang of fear catching at the back of his throat. Stops feeling the lancing pain in his ribs when he twists Natasha in his arms and starts feeling golden. He bites his lip as he smiles at her and the blood that floods his mouth is a reminder so he swallows it down with Natasha’s vodka, lets it burn slick and oily in his stomach.

"You look," Natasha begins and doesn’t finish, her breath a waft of grape and sugar from the bubblegum.

"It’s stopped hurting, Nat," he tells her, grin stretching so wide his split lip stings with it. She doesn’t smile back as he spins her around, her tumble of curls flying and her eyes way too knowing.

"You seen Steve today?" she pushes and Bucky frowns.

"Why’s everyone keep asking me that?"

"He’s been trailing all over the place looking for you, that’s why, and you know it, James."

Bucky closes his eyes and spins her faster instead.

 

*

 

"Buck," Steve had said, blinking up at him from where he crouched beside the sofa-bed, dabbing away the slimy trails of blood glinting off Bucky’s hands. "How’d you get into that fight again?"

"Just the usual," Bucky muttered, keeping his eyes low to the carpet. The way they’d cornered him in the alleyway as he was taking a piss had been so stupid, so fucking textbook, that he’d almost laughed.  

"These ain’t fight wounds," Steve said, "I know these." And of course he does, Steve’s come home plastered in the shit from a defensive before, when it comes down to it sometimes all you gotta do is curl in and wait for it to pass, and they both know it and -

"You tryna say something, Steve?"

"I’m not saying you didn’t fight back, Bucky," Steve said, then, "Tell me their names," eyes gone steely, and _no_. They’ll tell Steve why if they don’t kick his head in first, and Bucky’ll go to the dogs before Steve knows what he thinks of in the night.  

"It ain’t nothing to be frettin’ your pretty little head about, Stevie,” Bucky had sighed. He’d been so tired.

"This, nothing -"

"Don’t start, Steve, alright?"

Steve puts his hand to Bucky’s face instead, drags his thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone, and under the blood and grime, under his skin, Bucky can feel his own heartbeat go skittery. He turns his face into it so his lips brush against Steve’s hand, indirect, enough to be denied, and he’d heard the hitch in Steve’s breath and -

 

*

 

"You can’t keep spinning forever, James," Natasha says.

"I know, dollface, I know," he replies, "But ain’t it fun to try?"

 

*

 

The way they corner him in the alleyway as he’s taking a piss is so stupid, so fucking textbook, that he almost laughs.  But he doesn’t. He can’t.

_Don’t turn your back on them. Don’t you ever turn your back._

He zips himself up, braces himself on the turn, slips out the bicycle chain from where it lies curled in his pocket.

“Evening, gentlemen,” Bucky says, “You want me to take you for a turn on the floor, you only gotta ask,” and then he tells Steve later that he doesn’t remember much after that.

He’s not sure why it’s tonight. He’s felt it coming, brewing on the air, ever since he stopped stepping out with Nat. Thinks they saw him at the dance hall door, where the hat boy checks them for blades, thinks they saw him roll his shoulders back and make doll eyes at the kid. He goes for the redheads, goes for the blondes, pretends to care about what skin’s underneath, girl or boy or not. Bucky’s used to taking what he can get and hoarding it close though, so he don’t care, not at all.

He remembers, though, that’s the thing. He’s only gone and lied to Steve, ‘cause he always remembers when it would be better not to.  What else did you expect? James Buchanan Barnes has forget-me-not blue eyes that he sees every morning of his life, has the star of David stitched into his bones so he couldn’t unpick it if he wanted. His mother going _smile for me. Don’t let your sisters see you cry. Be a good boy for me now._ The curve of Steve’s shoulder when they walk home in the dawn half-light, the lay of his throat when he throws his head back to laugh. Nat in his shirt. He tries not to remember these things, he sure does, but it doesn’t stop him picking at them all the same.

They aren’t kind to him but Bucky didn’t expect kindness. Bucky can take it. He can. He curls in like Steve does asleep, his breathing going hoarse and shallow. Don’t turn your back. Sorry, Da. The times, they’re a-changing. This isn’t Poland.

_Uczynić go zatrzymać, wie kann ich, я не могуя я не могу я не могу -_

 

*

 

He comes to half an hour later and he is alone. He rolls onto his back and gasps up. The sky is hazy but you can’t see the stars here anyway so he’s not missing much. There’s saliva on his face. He tries to wipe it away but his hands are shaking.

The bicycle chain is in the gutter and he stares at it a good long while before getting up.

*

 

“Buck, how’d you get into that fight again?”

_Did we kill him? I don’t go in for no mercy killing._

_Nah. He’ll go running home to Rogers just fine._

“Just the usual.”

 

*

 

“You frightened me the other night, Buck,” Steve says slowly. It is in his flat, three days after, and nobody told Bucky that this whole Christian resurrection thing? It aches like nothing else. Bucky turns onto his side, lying on the floor, and faces him. Steve has that odd, defiantly serious face on, the one that says _we’re both going to hate this conversation, but we’re having it anyway_. “If you’d just tell me who it was -”

Bucky’s heart gives a low, dull throb.

“I don’t know who it was, Steve,” he snaps on instinct, “Jesus, leave it alone.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you sound like someone who doesn’t know.”

Bucky sits up then, glaring.

“You calling me a liar, Rogers?”

“Yeah,” Steve retorts, “I am actually. They shouldn’t get away with it, Bucky, they shouldn’t, there’s nothing right about that.”

“There’s a lot not right, Steve, but I doubt they give a damn.”

They stare at each other for a long, furious moment, until Bucky gives up. Deflating, he lies back down.

“Fuck you,” Bucky says flatly. “Go save someone else, Steve. I’m doing just fine without being your new crusade.”

They don’t speak for the rest of the night. Bucky goes home and lies on his own floor, blows smoke rings at the ceiling, keeps the record player up loud.

 

*

 

Bucky starts carrying a switchblade, buys it cheap down the market and keeps the bicycle chain in plain sight. This is just. This is just insurance.

He’d always promised Steve he wouldn’t, they wouldn’t. But.

It makes him feel safer. Can’t put a price on that.

 

*

 

“Come on then,” he shouts, “Come on then, who’s next, who wants to try it,” and that’s it, the secret’s out, Steve’s eyes on the blade even as he drags Bucky back and away. They’re scrapping with Maloney’s boys when it happens and Bucky doesn’t buy into hell but he thinks from the look in Steve’s eyes maybe he should start hedging his bets.

“You gotta calm down, Buck,” Steve says, “Calm it down now,” and it’s then Bucky realises he’s been shouting in Polish, screaming out his mother tongue like he did as a child. He’s never done this before, never picked the wrong tongue out of his head before, and it makes him stutter. They’re all staring at him, all of them.

“Knew there was something cracked,” Rumlow sneers, makes it twist thick and oily in Bucky’s gut. “You and the half-pint. Knew there something cracked.”

Steve steers Bucky away, keeps himself between them.

“Put the knife away, Buck,” he mutters, sounding furious, sounding disappointed, and Bucky obeys.

“Go on and take your goldie with you,” Rumlow shouts after them, and Bucky starts: he is small again and shielding the yellow star on his coat with his scarf. He feels an intake of breath from where Steve is (Bucky is stood to his right, always to his right) and he’s not quite sure how it happens but -

By the time he’s turned back properly, Steve has already thrown himself at Rumlow, knocked him proper to the ground, knocked him good and hard so Rumlow’s winded. It gives Steve a few seconds’ advantage and Steve - Steve grew up hard and hungry and Steve takes every scrap like it’s the last. He fights like it’s his last night alive and all through it he’s snarling, his voice always too big for him, and he’s going:

“Don’t you talk about him like that. Don’t you _ever_ talk about him like that.”

Bucky throws himself in after, throws himself headfirst, and he keeps the switchblade in his pocket because that’s what Steve does to you, isn’t it just? Isn’t it just that?  

Isn’t it always?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations (in order of Polish, German, Russian):
> 
>  
> 
> Make it stop, how can I, I can't.

**Author's Note:**

> Translations (always in order of Polish, German, Russian):
> 
> mother, soldier, i’m afraid
> 
> sister, star, who i am/who am i
> 
> sabbath, run, don’t look back
> 
> i miss home, i miss home, i miss home
> 
> Come talk to me on [tumblr](ilgaksu.tumblr.com) about teddy boys, comic book characters and how they intersect.


End file.
